4 Proactive DR Strategies Hold the Key to Averting Disaster

(May 23, 2014)

DMN Newswire--2014-5-23--

Author: Courtenay Troxel, Zetta.net

With wild fires and extreme heat ravaging California, the central states pounded by damaging thunderstorms and tornados, and hurricane season just on the horizon, the possibility that your company could be impacted by a natural disaster should be top of mind.

Even companies that do have disaster recovery (DR) plans in place often don't do them justice. They neglect to review or update DR strategies to account for any changes in the business or they overlook the need to periodically test the plans to see if they hold up during unforeseen downtime.

Taking this reactive approach to DR can have devastating repercussions. Just consider this alarming set of statistics:

43% of businesses that close as a result of a natural disaster never reopen. (Source: U.S. Congress)

30% of companies said they "are not at all confident" in their ability to recover their data center in a reasonable amount of time in the event of a disaster. (Source: SolarWinds survey conducted with Network World)

Businesses lose an average of $5,000 for every minute of downtime in an outage. (Source: Emerson Network Power)

Rather than wait to react with a formalized DR plan in the midst of the season, companies are best served taking a proactive approach and mapping out a robust strategy well before disaster strikes.

Here's 4 best practices for building an effective DR plan:

1. Business impact analysis

Identify what applications are critical to your business and what are your recovery time objectives.

2. Risk assessment

Architect your disaster recovery strategy by defining your infrastructure by what you can control and what you can't and identify any issues.

3. Risk management

Once you've identified those risks, put an action plan in place to mitigate risks.

4. Testing

The last step is to test your disaster scenarios in a controlled circumstance to uncover any shortcomings.

For more information on how to build an effective DR plan, go to Zetta.net's Disaster Recovery Planning IT initiative for best practices, templates, and tools. http://www.zetta.net/it-disaster-recovery-plan.php